Click
here to download
if you don't already have it: Several of the links are PDF files.

Teri
FahrendorfPortland,
Oregon Email:
teri @ roadbrewer . com

Welcome
to my website!

Content
mainly consists of articles that I have written over my 25-year professional
brewing & beer career. (1988-Present.) Articles may be useful to brewers
wishing to expand their knowledge of brewpub brewing. See column at
left for links.

Five New Articles: Not
listed on links at left. The PowerPoint presentations are a little bare
without my lengthy verbal explanations. Hope you find them interesting...
(Warning--They are a little slow to load because they are full-color PPT
files converted to PDF.)

Presented at
several institutions including Spirits Institute of Puget Sound,
Portland State University and Oregon State University. It touches
on my "5 Families of Malt" categorizations. Created with
photos and help from Robert Seggewiss, Great Western Malting's Master
Maltster.

In February
2015 I spoke at the excellent Craft Writing Symposium at the University
of Kentucky about my online experience with blogs, forums, websites,
e-newsletters, and how I used those to create and build Pink Boots
Society.

At the request
of some of my malt and hop customers, I wrote an article on how
to estimate their brewery's future hop needs. New Brewer magazine
published this article in the November-December 2011 annual Raw
Materials issue.

Welcome to my world I am a woman beer professional,
and have been ever since I began my unpaid brewing internship in November 1988
(and then my first paid brewing job on March 1, 1989). That makes me practically
a renegade Granny in the revolution of Craft Beer.

After
19 years as a Brewmaster, most of that at Steelhead Brewing Company, I quit to
take an once-in-a-lifetime road trip, where I visited 71 breweries, and brewed
at 38 of them. I called myself the Road Brewer and blogged my adventures at www.roadbrewer.com.
During that trip, a community began to take shape: in the shape of a shiny pink
rubber brewer's boot.

My
goal was to visit my brewing peers and brew with them in their breweries. When
planning the route, I connected the dots between breweries during the week, and
between relatives on weekends. Since there were long stretches without dots, I
asked the craft beer community to provide landing spots and email me if they wanted
a visit. I continued to plug in the dots until I had breweries to visit and places
to stay for the whole trip. My trip lasted 139 days (nearly 5 months) and 12,656
miles.

An
interesting coincidence was that many of the breweries that invited me to visit
employed young women brewers. When I arrived they set me to work alongside their
female brewer, who I had not only never met before, I had never even heard of
before. She had also not heard of me previously. In several cases we struck up
an easy bond and quick friendship. It became clear to me that these young women
had felt alone as the only woman brewer in their beer world. It was also clear
that my story of being a Brewmaster for 19 years offered them a vision of what
their own careers could aspire to. Suddenly at 47, I felt the call to give back
to the beer industry that I loved so much, by mentoring these women and others
like them.

At
the first brewery where this happened the young woman brewer asked, "Teri,
you tell me there are others like us how many of us are there?" I promised
I would try to find out as I made my trek across country. A few months into the
journey later, another young woman brewer posed the same question. I was proud
to provide an answer, "I've found 60 women brewers so far." Then she
asked, "Who are they? I want to network with them; I want to talk to them."
So I promised I would post the list on my website so she could have it.

While
on this trip I met many brewers with greater experience than I had, and I met
many who had less and needed my expertise. Several times I said, "Gee, I
wish I could give you a copy of an article I wrote for New Brewer back in 1993"
or some such, but I didn't have access to my published articles. So, with some
wrangling to get my articles from home in Oregon, I was able to build this website
while on the road. It contained my previously published articles, as well as articles
I wrote from the road covering topics that I knew by heart, but had never written
down.

This
educational website provided
the forum to publish my list of women brewers, and as I created the HTML list
of names for the website I thought to myself, "Calling it "List of Women
Brewers" is so boring. A sound byte (like Road Brewer) would be snazzier."
So I thought of the pink boots I had been wearing everyday of the trip, and I
thought of the Red Hat Society; the organization of jolly old ladies who go out
to party in red hats, and I coined my list the "Pink Boots Society."

The
story continues from there. Five years later we are an international nonprofit
association of women beer professionals with a focus on education, with 850+ members
worldwide. I am helped by many volunteers. We raise money for the scholarship
program we intend to create to help women beer professionals advance their careers
through education. We host two national meetings in the USA each year, one with
an educational seminar program. And there are regional meetings in the US, UK,
Argentina, Australia and soon in Germany and France. We are no longer just brewers,
but you must be a woman beer professional and earn income from beer to join us.